Interfacial tension (IFT) is a property of paramount importance in many technical areas as it deals with the forces acting at the interface whenever two immiscible or partially miscible phases are in contact. With respect to petroleum engineering operations, it influences most, if not all, multiphase processes associated with the extraction and refining of Oil and Gas, from the optimisation of reservoir engineering strategies to the design of petrochemical facilities. This property is also of key importance for the development of successful and economical CO2 geological storage projects as it controls, to a large extent, the amount of CO2 that can be safely stored in a target reservoir. Therefore, an accurate knowledge of the IFT of reservoir fluids is needed. Aiming at filling the experimental gap found in literature and extending the measurement of this property to reservoir conditions, the present work contributes with fundamental IFT data of binary and multicomponent synthetic reservoir fluids. Two new setups have been developed, validated and used to study the impact of high pressures (up to 69 MPa) and high temperatures (up to 469 K) on the IFT of hydrocarbon systems including n-alkanes and main gas components such as CH4, CO2, and N2, as well as of the effect sparingly soluble gaseous impurities and NaCl on the IFT of water and CO2 systems. Saturated density data of the phases, required to determine pertinent IFT values, have also been measured with a vibrating U-tube densitometer. Results indicated a strong dependence of the IFT values with temperature, pressure, phase density and salt concentration, whereas changes on the IFT due to the presence of up to 10 mole% gaseous impurities (sparingly soluble in water) laid very close to experimental uncertainties. Additionally, the predictive capabilities of classical methods for computing IFT values have been compared to a more robust theoretical approach, the Density Gradient Theory (DGT), as well as to experimental data measured in this work and collected from literature. Results demonstrated the superior capabilities of the DGT for accurately predicting the IFT of synthetic hydrocarbon mixtures and of a real petroleum fluid with no further adjustable parameters for mixtures. In the case of aqueous systems, one binary interaction coefficient, estimated with the help of a single experimental data point, allowed the correct description of the IFT of binary and multicomponent systems in both two- and three-phase equilibria conditions, as well as the impact of salts with the DGT.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:717005 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Pereira, Luís M. C. |
| Contributors | Tohidi, Bahman ; Chapoy, Antonin |
| Publisher | Heriot-Watt University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/10399/3207 |
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